cagey

Cagey core

WORK IN PROGRESS

[key-jee]

1. abbreviation: (CAGEY) Create A Game Engine Yourself
2. adjective: cautious, wary, or shrewd
3. adjective: Nicolas Cage-like

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What is Cagey?

Cagey is a code philosophy that makes the development of stateful game servers in Node.js easy, testable, flexible and maintainable. It provides a foundation of rules for how things are supposed to connect, and an ecosystem of plugins that follow this. The whole point of Cagey is to make integration with other technologies obvious and simple, while keeping a very strict separation of concerns. For more information on these rules that plugins need to follow, please read #plugin-development.

Software development (which very much includes framework development) is not a solved problem. And as we move on and try new concepts, we have to make some very strict decisions. That does not mean we believe these truths to be objective truths, nor that we won't ever change our minds on these.

There are several layers at which you can observe your server technology. At its very heart, we want as much of our code as possible to reflect business logic, not framework patterns, or the database we chose, or the network technology, etc. If we ever want to switch frameworks, databases, KPI services, etc. this should be as painless as possible. The fundamental nature of our business logic should not be contaminated by these choices.

Cagey attempts to solve this by keeping concerns separated as follows:

• Cagey Core
  • As small as possible
• Cagey Plugins
  • Concept aware
  • Technology unaware
  • Enable easy integration and switching of technologies in or out of a project
• Technology integrations
  • Made easy by Cagey plugins
  • 100% user land code (code can be inspired from documentation and examples that plugins provide)
  • As easy to change as any other user land code

Getting started

This installs Cagey core and the most commonly used plugins:

npm install cagey cagey-sessions cagey-peer-network cagey-client-messenger

Examples

See the ./examples folder and the various plugins for examples.

API

Cagey core and Cagey plugins

Many Cagey API emit events. All events may be listened to with async (...) => {} functions. The execution will only progress once all their promises have been resolved, and no errors were thrown.

Cagey core

A cagey object provides process lifecycle management features.

factory

const cagey = require('cagey').create({ log });

Creates and returns an instance of the Cagey class. You must pass a cagey-logger instance in an object.

async cagey.shutdown()

This emits:

• "beforeShutdown" () on the cagey instance.
• "shutdown" () on the cagey instance.

The events being emitted can be used to stop certain subsystems, and close connections.

Please note that this method does not kill the process. Cagey expects you to clean up or unref all I/O handlers, so that Node.js will gracefully shut down when all work is done. If you really insist on killing the process, you can do this manually:

cagey.on('shutdown', () => { process.exit(0); });

Plugins

• Logger: cagey-logger
• Client/server messaging: cagey-client-messenger
• Cagey distributed cluster messaging: cagey-peer-network
• User sessions: cagey-sessions

Plugin development

When developing plugins for Cagey, please keep the following rules in mind.

• Plugins are supposed to be technology concepts, not implementations. Integration examples should be documented alongside your plugin (in an examples/ folder, in your ReadMe file or in documentation elsewhere).
• A plugin solves only a single problem and should not exclude other plugins from being used on the same project. Having said that, documented integration patterns of the plugin may absolutely depend on other existing plugins.
• Prefix your NPM package name with cagey-.
• Wherever relevant, try to use the same dependencies for core functionality. This creates a consistent user experience, and reduces dependency chaos. For example:
  • Logging: cagey-logger
    • always accept an external cagey-logger object in setup.
    • always prefix log entries with [subsystem-name].
    • usually stick to the debug level; leave higher levels to user land.
    • do not log errors that you do not catch and handle; leave that to user land.
  • EventEmitter: eventemitter2
    • always emit using emitAsync so listeners can safely do I/O if they need to.
  • Deep copy: deep-copy
  • Configure duration using string notation, parseable with parse-duration
  • Configure bytes using string notation, parseable with bytes
• A well written plugin has:
  • Documentation
  • Usage examples
  • Unit tests
  • Static code analysis
  • A license that is identical to or compatible with Cagey
  • TravisCI and Greenkeeper

Typical API

Your plugin should expose itself through a create(apis, options) method on the module:

exports.create = function (apis, options) {
    return new MyPlugin(apis, options);
};

The constructor of your plugin can destructure the apis argument:

const EventEmitter = require('eventemitter2').EventEmitter2;
 
class MyPlugin extends EventEmitter {
    constructor({ log }, options) {
        super();
 
        this.log = log;
    }
}

After that, it's up to you to shape your API.

License

MIT

Credit

Cagey is developed and maintained by Wizcorp.